A Place That Doesn't Exist

Hot Charity; 2014

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Willis Earl Beal is the kind of guy who doesn’t need a rudder, the kind of guy who will push off into unknown waters just to see what’s out there. His atypical origin story doesn’t peg him as an outsider artist in the traditional sense—releasing an EP on your SoundCloud page usually precludes one from being labeled an outsider artist—but more importantly Beal defines himself as an outsider through his hermetic music. Like, say, Jandek, Beal dislodges himself from culture, and stays unimpeded by form, fidelity, or trends. It is so far what has made every Beal record such a joy to listen to.

The joy from this free A Place That Doesn’t Exist EP isn’t always from the music on it—though there are some quite brilliant moments—but more so from the plot development in Beal’s career. The leap from busted lo-fi recordings onAcousmatic Sorcery to having XL (Adele’s label) put out the well polished Nobody knows. was a whiplash move. This EP is not a full retraction of his major label sound, but Beal takes several deep breaths in order to make smaller music. The songs here rely less on bluesy moans to convey emotion.

Similarities between Tom Waits and Beal are duly noted, but where Waits can come across like a charlatan narrator of the wacky carnival of life, Beal more often is a part of the carnival. Mythical beginnings notwithstanding, what draws people to Beal is how well he hawks his kind of anachronism. You almost believe that the intrusive record static found throughout the record was something Alan Lomax did his best to try to remove. Most of the songs on the EP feature a mid-fi Beal working firmly in the folk medium, giving the songs a macabre baroque feel to it. Think Bert Jansch if he always wore a cape and cowl. “Bright Copper Noon” is one of the first Beal compositions that benches his voice to a broken waltz thick with synths, but “Babble On” inverts the whole thing, and keeps the fingerpicked lounge-folk behind Beal’s double-tracked soul tenor.

All the instrumentation and arrangements sound like they're clogging Beal’s id. There’s nothing quite so primal, so sexually explicit as "Too Dry To Cry" or as revealing as “Evening’s Kiss” so everything here comes out a bit heady and knock-kneed. This leads to new forms, like “The Axeman” a story about a tiny figurine that haunts Beal until he decides to set it on fire. The storytelling frame makes it more an exemplum of Beals’ demented nature, like a preacher moralizing about his own lost soul in a parable of what not to do if you think your toys are silently mocking you.

No, Beal’s fringe side comes out directly on the antagonist “Toilet Parade (Ode To NYC)”, which, for its titular accuracy, is kind of a bummer in its faux performance art execution. The half-hour EP closes with two spoken-word performances, one tender (“Hazel Eyes”) and one very much not. The final track literally speaks to Beal's obsession with being a 21st century nowhere man. In a spirited monologue, with a cadence somewhere between a mystic sidewalk preacher and a character on campy sci-fi TV show, Beal describes the curled, uncanny objects in his world: heat rashes, floating red lights, skinflint pirate ladies. It all leads to the end, a condemnation of the academic industrial complex: “School is for me another useless, required step on the road to a place that does not exist.”

It’s exciting, though it certainly doesn’t jive with the nocturnal vibe of the rest of the album. Beal’s obsession with being “nobody” from “nowhere” isn’t a bid for anonymity and mysteriousness, it’s more an anxiety and separation from the world. Ironically, it's an anxiety stemming from not being on the outside. Is this angst a key to why he’s hiding behind more instrumentation, why his carnal growl is absent through the album? Is that why this latest offering is so mannered and scattered? There’s enough mystery baked in his songs he really doesn’t need the “outsider” label. And by the joy in plot development I mean that Beal, like the prolific Waits and Jandek before him, will hopefully be known more for the final shape of his trajectory as an artist. If the end path is as fascinating and demented as the individual mile markers, it’s all we can hope for.